Christopher is currently a reader in Middle East politics at Durham University and a visiting fellow at Leiden University College in the Hague, Netherlands. He was previously an assistant professor at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates and a visiting associate professor at Kyoto University in Japan. He is also an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In April 2017 he held the Daoud Family Lectureship in Middle Eastern Studies at Albion College, Michigan.

He holds degrees from the University of Cambridge (BA, MA), and the University of St. Andrews (M.Litt, PhD).

He is the principal investigator on a three year-long project, employing a full-time postdoctoral researcher. He has supervised ten doctorates to completion, with his advisees having taken up assistant professorships and postdoctoral fellowships at Georgetown University, University of Pennsylvania (“UPenn”), University of Tubingen, Exeter University, Durham University, Kings College London, Qatar University, and the Emirates Diplomatic Academy. He has externally examined a number of doctorates internationally across a range of universities including Australian National University, Tel Aviv, Oxford, St. Andrews, Leeds, Exeter, the London School of Economics, and Queens University Belfast.

He has taught full-time for fifteen years in higher education and has convened a number of modules, including
Politics of the Oil Monarchies,
Middle East in the International System,
Introduction to Middle East Politics, and (at his previous institution) Global Studies,
State and Society,
Comparative Politics,
Development and Underdevelopment, and Research Methods in the Social Sciences. In 2014 he was runner-up in the Durham Student Union teacher of the year award (for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law). He has held a number of departmental management portfolios,
inter alia, acting deputy head of school, director of undergraduate studies, and director of postgraduate studies (both taught and research).

He has served as an expert witness on more than twenty occasions in a range of extradition, immigration, Interpol, and terrorism cases. In 2010 his evidence played a leading role in determining the outcome of Britain's longest running extradition case, and in 2014 his legal work formed the basis of an REF
impact case study. He is currently preparing a similar, but more substantial impact case study in anticipation of the REF 2021 exercise.

He has delivered a number of invited and endowed public lectures at universities around the world, including: Stanford, Yale, George Washington, Sciences-Po in Paris, Leiden, Kyoto, Otago, Amsterdam, American University of Beirut, Oxford, LSE, SOAS, St. Andrews, Exeter, Leeds, Bath, and Aberdeen.

He has delivered briefings and prepared reports for a range of organizations and institutions including NATO Intelligence, GCHQ, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (policy unit, ambassadorial briefings, etc.), the Foreign Services Institute (US), the New Zealand intelligence services, the New Zealand and Netherlands Ministries for Foreign Affairs, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2016 he gave
oral evidence
on Britain’s Middle East policy to the House of Lords International Relations Committee and in 2017 his work was cited in a UK Parliament Select Committee’s inquiry report entitled ‘The Middle East: Time for New Realism‘.